If anyone today were to launch a proposal like that of André
Breton -who considered the best way of achieving the full realization
of surrealism was to go out into the street and shoot at random-, I
fear it would arouse similar outrage and would confirm an open secret:
that ours is age of mellifluous ideas in the field of culture. But this
age does at least have the virtue of allowing us to draw the line
between the mellifluous and the radical. What is more -for every cloud
has a silver lining-, it is also an age in which the union between art
and terms like radicalism, intensity and critical thought has ceased to
be the pleonasm which enables many of us to understand art and cultural
practices in general and has become the prime object of our demands.Going out
into the
street and shooting at random is a response to the
need to invoke radicalism and intensity as the foundations of
art. And it achieves this by recalling a number of episodes
which
are -or were once- linked to the pursuit of slightly nonconformist
ideas.
Radicalism and the notions I have associated with it may, of course, be
seen as somewhat problematical. But in any event, the problematical is
no ally of political correctness, or even of political rhetoric steeped
in social commitment; it is disliked by the inveterately fastidious and
at odds with convention. And it was just such conventionalisms which
were observed, and responded to, by Tristan Tzara and Hugo Ball in a
small night club in Zurich: the Cabaret Voltaire. Tzara and Ball
attempted, with much ado but little impact, to identify the factions:
themselves on the one side, and opposite them all those who fail to
think critically: "Today, with the help of our friends from France,
Italy and Russia, we publish this little booklet to describe the
activities of this cabaret whose aim is to recall that, beyond war and
fatherlands, there are independent men who live for different ideals".
Dada's desire -one might almost say its need- to cultivate independent,
critical thought, radical ideas with a keen sense of humour, resounds
like a conscience. And a handful of episodes from 20th century culture
provide a response to this resonance: Johnny Rotten's "ground
down teeth", for instance, as remembered by Greil Marcus in the book Lipstick Traces,
which had the virtue of being one of the first to
reconstruct the history of certain affinities which are a secret to no
one. These very affinities were constantly explored, and alluded to, by
Malcolm McLaren and Jamie Reid, who repeated what they had seen the
situationists do in Paris, or the New York Dolls in New York, sparking
off repercussions they could not have foreseen. There is even a
familiar ring about the arguments of Malcolm McLaren, who said that,
compared to the reality of English society, there was nothing
scandalous about the Sex Pistols.
Malcolm McLaren evoked the situationists as a memory he needed to
revive. Thus a Sex Pistols concert resembled the screening in
Paris of a film which showed absolutely nothing and left the audience
feeling deeply insulted. And this same "nothingness" was reminiscent of
Hugo Ball reciting a sound poem in the Cabaret Voltaire. And it was all
rather like the outbreak of a revolution. And that's all: a resemblance
to times when there are no rules, when everything remains to be done,
and everything can be made fun of. This, perhaps, is the famous Utopia
with no Utopian horizon: the lowering of responsibility to basement
level.
In all probability the bid to reconstruct and update radicalism and
intensity in art will involve highlighting affinities, turning up the
volume of familiar noises, and bringing to the fore the faint rumble of
certain significant events, and others that are less so. Going out
into the street and shooting at random explores
some of
these
affinities and a few personal phillias as well. Some were chosen
because they stand out as moments of true intensity -easier to spot
now, perhaps, precisely because they are farther off in time - which
were witnessed by only a few, shut inside a café, or a
cinema
or, maybe, a basement. Others because they are related to the
development of independent, critical ideas with a keen sense of humour.
And still others because they hold nothing sacred, or act with brazen
independence. And all of them because they implemented the maxim that
extremes are what we think about and nuances what we discuss. This
could well be a definition of radicalism or, to put it another way, the
rejection of mediocrity and cowardly ideas. Since we're going to get it
wrong, let's get it completely wrong.
Thus Going out
into the
street and shooting at random does not
aim to be a tedious documentary process which puts everything back into
its tranquil place in history and heaps still more tons of boredom on
top of us. It is an attempt to revive a few fleeting moments of
intensity, if only like a resounding conscience. Inviting us, needless
to say, to return to the common ground of all subversion: the basement.
Surrounded as we are by mellifluous ideas and tedium, all this
thoroughly familiar noise serves as a pressing reminder that something
must be done because we have something to say. This is no longer a
pleonasm, but a platitude, which, even so, is not respected, though for
those who delight in making political judgements and classifying
everything as either problematical or pro-regime, it may be evocative
of a return to order or a sprinkling of liberalism. The examples,
however, will be slightly odd: they are provided by Chip Lord, and Pau
Riba, and a Rastafarian hacker, all of whom refute the tendency to make
art and culture into something institutionalized from the very start,
something ready to become history before it even exists, and who also
stress that having something to say is more important than where you
say it, or how you say it, or how appropriate it is.

with:

There is a Spanish translation (it just might be this one) of this book
by Tristan Tzara, the co-founder, with Hugo Ball, of the Cabaret
Voltaire and Dada in Zurich. Though published under a pseudonym, it was
done by Paco Ferrer Lerín for Carlos Barral in the
seventies.
Paco Ferrer Lerín is a poet and writer and a member of the
Novísimos generation. After publishing several books of
short
stories and poems, he devoted himself to ornithology and recovering
carrion-feeding birds in Upper Aragon. He has recently published a
remarkable novel entitled Níquel
(Nickel)

In 2000 Richard Hamilton revived his interest in reproducing the works
of Marcel Duchamp, notably those related to La mariée
mise à nu
par ses célibataires, même, and he
created a
two-part map of the Grand
Verre in cooperation with the MNAC and the Centre Georges
Pompidou. One part referred to the bachelors' space and the other to
the bride. In each he describes the operation of Duchamp's machine,
including features foreseen in the preparatory notes to the Boîte Verte
which
-maybe out of sheer laziness?- never made it into the permanently
unfinished version in the Philadelphia Museum of Art (which published
the English version of the maps).

All
Yesterday's Parties
-which harks back to, and modifies, the title of the famous song All Tomorrow's Parties,
from the first Velvet Underground LP produced by Andy Warhol and The
Factory in 1966, complete with the banana on the sleeve- is a
collection of everything about the band that appeared in the press
between 1966 and 1971, from reviews of their concerts to interviews.
Editor Clinton Heylin recalls in the introduction that Velvet
Underground was the first band to go beyond rock.

In 1972, Chip Lord and Doug Michels founded the Ant Farm group whose
purpose was to hurl satire at the icons of American society. They did
two projects in 1975: in The
Eternal Frame they dressed up as the president and his
wife to
re-enact JFK's assassination in Dallas and visit the JFK Memorial
Museum; and in Media
Burn,
Chip Lord celebrated 4 July by crashing a rocket-shaped Cadillac into a
huge pile of television sets. Media
Burn is a video summary of the day's media coverage and
features
a speech by the resuscitated JFK.

Pau Riba performed at the Canet Rock festival on 26 July 1975, after
songs by Orquestra Plateria, Maria del Mar Bonet and Companyia
Elèctrica Dharma. He came on stage in his underpants,
probably
after swallowing several acids because, as he himself remarked, "I
don't know, the fact is I don't remember much about it".
The double LP Dioptria
-the first edition of which came out in 1971- was re-issued in
1978. The double album contains some of Pau Riba's legendary
numbers, including Noia
de
Porcellana (Porcelain Girl) and Ja s'ha mort la
besàvia
(Great-grandmother's died). It is an acid record, not only because of
the drugs and its off-key tone, but because “it's a savage
attack on
the petit-bourgeois mentality and the Christian-progressive family seen
as the basic cell of society” (Pau Riba's own words).

After the Sex Pistols' disastrous American tour, during which Johnny
Rotten quit the band after the San Francisco concert and set out for
Jamaica in search of reggae while Sid Vicious remained (permanently) in
New York with Nancy Spungen, the remnants of the group travelled to
Brazil. There they recorded a theme with Ronnie Biggs, the famous Great
Train Robber, who stole £2,600,000 and made his getaway, from
prison and the UK, in 1965.No One Is
Innocent
became the title of the Sex Pistols' last-but-one (?) album. And once
again the poster and album were designed by Jamie Reid, who had been in
Paris with Malcolm McLaren at the end of the seventies and who, with
McLaren, Vivienne Westwood and Johnny Rotten, made up the core of the
Sex Pistols.
Jamie Reid used to say that the illustration on the front of Never Mind The Bollocks
was
an attempt to make it as ugly as possible. It has recently
appeared in some list or other as one of the best graphic designs of
the 20th century.

Jello Biafra formed the Dead Kennedys in 1978 in San Francisco, a year
after the Sex Pistols had given what was to be their last concert
there. The Dead Kennedys' second album, Plastic Surgery Disasters,
was issued in 1982. It bears a picture of the skeletal hand of a
starving African child on top of a white hand.
A year later, while still a member of the hardcore band, Jello Biafra
ran for the San Francisco municipal elections and came in fourth.

Please
Kill Me,
by Legs McNeil (the editor of “Punk” magazine in
New York in the 1970s)
and Gillian McCain, is a collection of statements from interviews with
the main figures of Punk, ranging from their forerunners in the late
sixties and early seventies -Lou Reed and the members of Velvet
Underground, Iggy Pop and the New York Dolls- to the Ramones, Johnny
Rotten and Malcolm McLaren of the Sex Pistols.

The name of the band -Sonic Youth- is in itself a statement of
intentions: sound, rather than music, is what it's all about, and it
must have a physical dimension. The first concerts by no-wave
New
York bands, such as Sonic Youth or
S·W·A·N·S, sought to create
a curtain of
sound.
In 1992, Mike Kelley created all the artwork for the album Dirty.

RanXerox
first
appeared in black and white in 1978 under the name RankXerox
(until the
electronics multinational objected to the comic strip's chief
character). In 1980 colour albums began to come out about the
gratuitous violence of the robot RanXerox, who is in love with the girl
Lubna. In one of the Spanish-language editions there is a photograph of
Liberatore and Tamburini in the company of Franz Zappa on the first
page. After Tamburini's death, Liberatore concentrated on illustration.
In 1993 he revived the character of RanXerox in one last story.

Dynebolic is a Live-CD distributed by GNU-Linux (in other words, it
needs no installation but starts up directly from the CD when the
computer is re-booted, and when the session is over, you re-boot
without the CD and the original proprietary operating system returns).
It is a complete operating system on an ordinary CD which is
distributed free. Maintained by a community headed by Rasta
hacker Jaromil, it was specially developed for media activists and
artists and contains utilities for multimedia production.

Since 1994 Ignasi Aballí has been keeping dust in bags in
order
to reconstruct works as though they were tracks (footprints on the
wall) or make pictures solely out of the dust left by the passing of
time. The dust is similar to that which covered Duchamp's Grand Verre,
which
was “kept” in a warehouse and photographed by Man
Ray in 1920. In Bartleby
y compañía,
Enrique Vila-Matas recalled writers who do not write because
they
are drawn by the negative impulse of nothingness. This same impulse
moved Debord & Co. to present Hurlement en faveur de
Sade,
a film with no pictures and no sound, in 1952. The title of Ignasi
Aballí's exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts in Santander
in
2004 was Nada
para ver
(Nothing to see) -different ways of doing nothing- and when Paco Ferrer
Lerín launched his novel Níquel,
he remarked
that he is a writer who does not write (?).

In 1999 Jens Hanning exchanged a fluorescent light tube from the Luther
King Food Store, a Vietnamese shop in an Afro-American district in
Houston, Texas, with an identical tube from the Overgaden exhibition
space in Copenhagen. In an individual exhibition at Copenhagen's
Nicolai Wallner gallery in 2002, he repeated the operation by swapping
the fluorescent lights from a food store in Bangkok with those from
gallery.

1. In 1997 Antonio Ortega cooked a meal for some friends at which the
main dish was Rufina's first egg. Rufina was a hen who lived
with
Antonio Ortega for a year, adapting to domestic behaviour alien to hens
and becoming the object of Antonio's Ortega's artistic (?)
experiments.
2. In Determinación
de personaje, a critic and an artist, one tall and the
other on
the short side, literally do a remake of a sketch by the comic team
Faemino and Cansado. The defining features of both characters is their
physical appearance and each one's determination to be himself: short
and tall, intelligent and stupid....
3. Antonio
Ortega & The
Contestants was an individual exhibition by Antonio Ortega
in
London which consisted in a joint exhibition with young graduates from
the Faculty of Fine Arts in Barcelona.
4. Antonio Ortega's main project in 2004 focussed on Yola Berrocal. He
built an office in Espai 13 to collect funds for a wax figure of Yola
Berrocal. Later this office provided the walls and floor of his studio
(the venue for the presentation of Going out into the
street and
shooting at random). The artists MoMu and NoEs
developed
all the promotional materials about Yola Berrocal

Rubén Martínez, who was one of the
Contestants, is
a member of Yproductions as well as an artist. He is also the dreadful,
incorrect humorist of Chistes
(Jokes):
“There's this homosexual who's walking down the street and he
meets
another homosexual and they say to each other: How're you doing, you
crappy faggot? Fuck the shitty whore that made you such a fucking son
of a bitch!
Then there's this black man who's walking down the street and he meets
another black man and they say to each other: How're you doing, you
crappy nigger? Fuck the shitty nigger whore who made you such a fucking
son of a bitch!
And then there's this mentally retarded guy who's walking down the
street and he meets another mentally retarded guy and they say to each
other: How're you doing, you lump of shit? Fuck the shitty whore who
made you such a fucking loony!"

El Perro, a group of artists from Madrid, has filled the streets of
Madrid and Rome on two separate occasions with human-shaped targets,
the same type of target as the police use for shooting practice. In
Rome the police themselves confiscated all the targets for illegal
advertising. And the El Perro group's targets were in fact advertising
an exhibition of their work Lo
importante es participar (It's taking part that matters):
a
shooting gallery where visitors can play at shooting at images of
passers-by projected onto a screen.

Guy Richards Smit used members of New York artistic circles as actors
in the film Nausea
2
in which the story of a porn actress mingles with these same New York
artistic circles. Nausea
2,
a production in a seedy amateur porno and musical style, narrates a
weird love affair between a pornographic actress and an artist.

Anna Fasshauer modifies (tunes?) cars and then photographs them: she is
capable of turning a Volvo into a flimsy cardboard limousine or
painting a battered and abandoned wreck with the markings of a police
car.
The car, notably the Mercedes, is an inescapable artistic reference.
Bertrand Lavier's Mercedes
Benz, 190 (1989), for instance, was entirely repainted and
exhibited in 1998 as part of Artificial, while the Atelier van
Lieshout's defence and vigilance unit is also a Mercedes, in this case
a pickup with room for an enormous submachine gun.

Martí Anson is planning to steal Serge Lemoyne's picture Dryden
(1975) from the
Musée des Beaux-Arts de Montréal in May next
year. First
step, the Gang: Martí, David, Joan, Rafel, Alex and the
girl,
Natasha.

who gives the instructions about how to turn the poster into a magazine.